News

Portland activists are renewing their calls to prioritize the construction of a municipally owned broadband network in the Oregon city of 635,000. With an historic infusion of federal subsidies and a looming shakeup of city politics, advocates for community-owned broadband say the time is right to finally revolutionize city telecom infrastructure with an eye on affordability.

Superior, Wisconsin officials have given the green light to the first pilot area for Superior’s new city-owned fiber network. Dubbed Connect Superior, the open access fiber network aims to deliver affordable gigabit access to every resident, community anchor institution and business in the city of nearly 27,000. The initial $2.26 million cost of the pilot will be paid for with the help of $5 million from the city’s $17 million allocation from the American Rescue Plan Act funding.

Bountiful, Utah officials and community broadband advocates are breathing a sigh of relief as the Utah Taxpayers Association’s “Gather Utah” petition to stop the city from building an open-access network in partnership with UTOPIA Fiber fell short. This past Friday was the deadline for “Gather Utah” to collect enough signatures for a petition that would have forced a citywide vote on the $43 million in revenue bonds authorized in May by city councilors to fund network construction.

Last week, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) hosted Dr. Traci L. Morris, Executive Director of the American Indian Policy Institute (AIPI) at Arizona State University for a webinar titled “Indigenous Digital Sovereignty: From the Digital Divide to Digital Equity,” which situated Tribal broadband work and Tribal sovereignty in the context of recent federal funding opportunities like BEAD. Morris’s webinar dug into her own participatory research data investigating the digital divide in Indian Country, which was prompted by a dearth of quality data representing connectivity needs for Native Americans living on Tribal lands.

In this new space we will highlight insightful news stories, blog posts, podcasts, or videos we’ve come across over the past week or so – with an eye to separate the signal from the noise.

Fort Piece, Florida officials say the city continues to make steady progress with its plan to expand access to affordable fiber to all 45,000 Fort Pierce residents with the help of the city-owned utility. The network, inspired by similar utility-backed efforts in cities like Chattanooga, promises to deliver multi-gigabit speeds at prices notably lower than regional monopolies.

The city of Dublin, Ohio has struck a public private partnership with altafiber (formerly known as Cincinnati Bell) to build a new citywide fiber network city leaders hope will finally deliver the kind of affordable, next-generation broadband access Dublin’s 50,000 residents have long been clamoring for. Construction of the city network is expected to begin in Spring of 2024, with every premise in Dublin passed by a 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) capable network within three years.

Just as the BEAD program becomes a major driving force in the ongoing broadband-ification of America, hundreds of local network builders, operators, thought-leaders, and policy-makers will descend on Denver, Colorado for Mountain Connect 2023 early next month. As with the previous eight annual Mountain Connect conferences, this year’s three-day conference in the Mile High City will bring together a veritable who’s-who of people working in the trenches of a national effort to bring high-speed Internet access to the tens of millions unserved and underserved households and businesses across the U.S.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society has put out the call for new Opportunity Fund Fellowship applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle. Fellowships will range from $5,000 to $20,000 with a tenure ranging from 6 months to 2 years.

A recently published report should help bolster the case that the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) – which subsidizes the cost of monthly Internet service for income-eligible households – won’t just help more Americans get broadband access, it can also incent Internet service providers (ISPs) to make infrastructure investments in unserved and underserved areas. The report suggests the ACP might be more than just a temporary solution to an immediate need for affordable access, and has the potential to promote something more structural – investment in communities that would have previously been bypassed by ISPs.

Panhandle Telephone Cooperative Inc. (PTCI) has announced the broadband provider will be dramatically expanding access to its fiber broadband services in New Mexico thanks to a new $43.4 million grant made possible by federal infrastructure legislation. The $43 million cash infusion will allow the cooperative to expand access outside of its existing footprint into rural Union County, located in northeast New Mexico.

Ponca City, Oklahoma officials say they’ve completed construction of a citywide fiber broadband network both ahead of schedule and under budget. And now business is booming. The finished network is now providing affordable, uncapped, multi-gigabit fiber access to every local resident in the community or 24,100 residents of Northern Oklahoma city.

Join us Wednesday, July 12th at 4pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guests Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) to talk about all the recent broadband news that's fit to print.

Officials in the South Texas town of Harlingen say they’ve put their plan to deploy a municipal broadband network on hold after projected costs ballooned well beyond original estimates. Originally, Harlingen officials had hoped to construct a $4 million fiber network to shore up broadband access to the city’s unserved and under-served populace, using a portion of the city’s $22 million share of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

Bountiful, Utah officials have settled on a plan to bring Bountiful Fiber and affordable connectivity to its residents and businesses. By unanimous vote of the city council, the issuance of $48 million in bonds was recently authorized to fund construction of what will be a city-owned open access fiber network. A dark money campaign spearheaded by the Utah Taxpayers Association (UTA), however, is threatening to derail the project.

The coalition known as Digital Equity LA assembled to picket in front of State Sen. Steven Bradford’s Office, publicly calling for an “end to digital redlining” and for passage of Assembly Bill 41 (AB 41), also known as The Digital Equity in Video Franchising Act of 2023. If passed as is, the proposed bill – which we wrote about previously here – would establish an equal access requirement, anti-discrimination provisions, and a process for the public and local governments to provide input on the franchise agreements governing how cable Internet service providers serve their communities.

Allegan County, Michigan will soon receive a $30 million state grant to finalize the deployment of a new open access, carrier-neutral fiber network. The end result will bring overdue competition – and affordable multi-gigabit fiber access – to long neglected communities by 2025. The $30 million award is part of Michigan’s $238 million Realizing Opportunity with Broadband Infrastructure Networks (ROBIN) grant program, made possible by 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the resulting Capital Projects Fund.

Colorado Springs, Colorado and its city-owned utility have begun construction on the second phase of a promising open access fiber optic network that should bring affordable fiber broadband to the city of half a million residents. Construction of the network by Springs Utilities began in the first region in September 2022, shortly after the city-owned utility struck a 25-year lease agreement with Ting to be the network anchor tenant.

It was a big week for ECFiber as Vermont’s first – and oldest – Communication Union District (CUD) celebrated lighting up the last hub of its 1,500 mile-network in White River Junction. To mark the occasion of connecting the “golden patch cord” that will extend high-speed Internet service to eight more communities in the Upper Valley region, White River Junction’s VFW Hall was packed to celebrate what ECFiber officials liken to “the Golden Spike moment tying the first transcontinental railroad together.”

Apropos to yesterday’s BEAD allocation announcement, here’s a sample from Episode 72 in which ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative Director Christopher Mitchell and the livestream crew discuss whether federal policy disincentivizes new small broadband providers from getting access to grant funding.